Freedom Riders mark their 50th anniversary.

Hank Thomas stands near the former Greyhound bus station where he and other Freedom Riders attempted to desegregate the bus terminals in the South and were imprisoned for their cause in Jackson, Miss. Thomas and other Freedom Riders returned to Jackson for their 50th reunion.

This is a May 1961 file photograph of a Freedom Rider bus that went up in flames when a fire bomb was tossed through a window near Anniston, Ala.

Photo By KIN MAN HUI/Kin Man Hui/kmhui@express-news.net

Freedom Rider Dolores Lynch Williams poses for a photo with Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour after a dedication at the former Jackson Greyhound bus station during the Freedom Riders 50th reunion in Jackson, Miss., on May 24, 2011.

Photo By KIN MAN HUI/Kin Man Hui/kmhui@express-news.net

Freedom Riders Hezekiah Watkins (left) and Jesse James Davis share a laugh before a dedication of a marker at civil rights activist Medgar Evers' home in Jackson, Miss., on May 23, 2011. Watkins and Davis were attending the Freedom Riders 50th reunion.

But the neon greyhound gallops in place as it did 50 years ago above the Art Deco building where police arrested activists who sought to end segregated travel across the Deep South.

Dozens gathered below the icon as dignitaries unveiled a marker designating the old Greyhound bus station as the third historical stop on the Mississippi Freedom Trail, a series of landmarks from the Civil Rights Movement.

Now home to an architectural firm, the building held turbulent memories for many, especially those known as the 1961 Freedom Riders.

The four looked over the booking photos embedded in the plaque, noting the mug shot of inmate No. 21158 — Williams, then Dolores Lynch, 15.

Tears filled her eyes as she glanced at her younger self.

“It'll be here forever, even when we're gone,” Williams said. “They said I was disturbing the peace; somebody disturbed my peace.”

The four joined more than 190 other activists May 22-26 at a 50th anniversary Freedom Riders reunion, at which Gov. Haley Barbour apologized for their treatment on behalf of Mississippi, and the police chief and mayor — both African Americans — spoke of the changes that let them serve the city.

“I'm so proud when I look around Mississippi and the country,” Thomas said, “and see the fruit of what we have done.”

Watkins and another rider, Patricia Dilworth, shared their experiences this week with a San Antonio audience as part of the St. Philip's College celebration of the 146th anniversary of Juneteenth.

In 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated travel was a violation of interstate business practices. Students decided to test the Jim Crow system.

Word of riders filling Mississippi jails drew support and swelled their ranks. Supporters came from across the country to Jackson by bus, train and air. They represented all races, ages and faiths.

As the reunion began, they rode Greyhound buses to locales where they were once arrested, attacked and beaten for doing what, Williams said, they “felt in our hearts was right to do.”

Their first stop was Tougaloo College, on the northern edge of Jackson, for a memorial service honoring Freedom Riders who had died.

The riders filed from the buses, shaded by long strands of Spanish moss, as they entered Woodworth Chapel and sat under a canopy of dark wood beams. Students placed lit candles at the altar as the names of deceased riders were read.

“There are so many of the riders not here,” Williams said near the pulpit where many civil rights leaders spoke over the years. “God has allowed me to tell this story, so he'll get the glory.”

Williams became part of the movement after she told her parents she was going to church, but she walked to the Trailways station with 11 others into the whites' waiting area.

Police arrested her, put her in the back of a vehicle and drove her to the county jail. While she was behind bars, her thoughts turned to a possible outcome — no one would have known if she was taken away and killed.

When her parents learned where she was, they weren't allowed to see her. Once they were reunited with her, her parents were proud of her actions.

“I could do what they couldn't do,” she said. “They had a mortgage and bills to pay.”

Thirteen-year-old Hezekiah Watkins was swept into the movement July 7, 1961, after a friend pushed him through the door of the Greyhound terminal when they tried to see what a Freedom Rider looked like. Police asked him where he was born. He truthfully responded Milwaukee, Wis., but they put him with the Freedom Riders and took them all to Parchman Prison, more than 100 miles away.

He was put in a cell with hardened criminals who were puzzled at his arrival.

“Why are you here?” an inmate asked him.

“I didn't do anything,” he said.

“Everybody in here says the same thing,” the inmate said.

When the governor learned a 13-year-old was in the prison, he had Watkins, who had spent three days at Parchman, brought to the Jackson Jail.

Jesse James Davis was 19 when he was arrested July 9, 1961. He grew up in Jackson, resenting the unwritten laws he was expected to follow, such as stepping aside for whites and sitting in the back of the buses.

“Jim Crow ate away at me,” Davis said. “My mother said, ‘Jesse, you're going to have to leave the South. You don't know how to talk to white folks.' I just couldn't be that type of person. I never felt I was below anyone else.”

The arrival of the freedom riders, he said, was his chance to rebel against the system.

Visiting the past

On the second day of the reunion, eight buses parked on a hill near the home of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, where white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith lay in honeysuckle and shrubs across the street late on June 12, 1963, and shot Evers in the back, killing him as he stepped from his car.

James Donald III, 15, stopped Watkins and Davis and asked for their autographs in a book about the Freedom Riders.

“It's an honor,” James said, after he shook the men's hands. “I read about them in my history class. It's been my dream to meet them.”

The men stood outside the ranch-style home with Barbara Bowie, Davis' younger sister and executive director of the Dr. Bowie Scholarship Foundation in San Antonio. She remembered running to the scene that night with friends after she heard about the shooting.

“I didn't want to stay. I was crying,” Bowie said. “It was devastating.”

A day later, at the site of the former Trailways terminal, Thomas hailed the Jackson activists who kept demonstrating after the Freedom Riders left as the “real heroes of the movement.”

“They suffered reprisals, lest we forget,” Thomas said.

After the event, Watkins drove to Farish Street, once the hub of the black community, with Davis, Bowie and two visitors. It also was where Jackson activists planned protests.

Davis and Watkins stopped in the dark doorway of a building where Davis planned voter's registration drives and boycotts in an upstairs office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Evers' office was above the restaurant, as well as that of Harvard professor of psychiatry Dr. Alvin Poussaint and his medical team. Watkins said they administered medical help to him and other injured activists.

“If he had not sewed me up I may not be here,” Watkins said. “The thing is, he was here to help.”

On the fourth day, the buses passed mountains of wild ivy north of Jackson before entering the Delta low land. They arrived at Money, Miss., beside Bryant's Grocery, a crumbling part of civil rights history overrun with crawling brush.

The marker there told of Carolyn Bryant, a white storekeeper, who accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of flirting with her in 1955.

Bryant's husband and his half-brother abducted and murdered Till, a story that shook Williams as a 9-year-old.

Then Mississippi state troopers led the buses past sun-beaten fields and shaded bayous to Parchman Prison, where more than 300 Freedom Riders were jailed and endured beatings and solitary confinement.

Bowie walked with her brother until he gripped the bars of the cell where he heard the captain of the guard yelling, “Shut up them damn freedom songs.”

“This is my cell,” he said, staring into the space where 50 years ago guards pulled him and a dozen others into solitary confinement when they refused to stop singing.

On the last day of the reunion, they returned to the Marriott across from the Greyhound station. Thomas stood in the shade of the hotel, where blacks couldn't stay during the days of the Freedom Riders. Today, he owns three of the hotels.